As hall celebrates its 50th, plans underway to restore its luster

As it turns 50, Jones Hall, a mid-century beauty, is...

1of3In 1966, concert-goers welcomed a modern and elegant Jones Hall. Adjustable acoustic pods attached to the ceiling were considered advanced at the time.Photo: James Nielsen, Staff

2of3In 1966, concert-goers welcomed a modern and elegant Jones Hall. Adjustable acoustic pods attached to the ceiling were considered advanced at the time.Photo: HC staff

3of3﻿﻿Jones Hall ﻿was built ﻿on a relatively small downtown block, presenting a challenge for the architects designing such a massive concert hall. ﻿Photo: George Honeycutt, HC staff

Houston Symphony concerts in the city's leaky Depression-era Music Hall often were marred by the ringside roar from the adjacent Sam Houston Coliseum. In dim, dingy dressing rooms, tuxedoed musicians rubbed shoulders with 1950s wrestlers such as Pepper Gomez or Danny McShain.

The old hall was a vestige of Houston's gritty past.

But by the 1960s, a new city - one of aerospace, medicine and the arts - was emerging. Nothing signaled the change more flamboyantly than the gleaming, marble-clad Jesse H. Jones Hall for the Performing Arts rising in the city's neglected heart.

Opening its doors 50 years ago this month, the hall in the 600 block of Louisiana was everything ever-aspiring Houston longed to be. "It was so modern," said Steven Fenberg, biographer of Jones, whose family foundation, Houston Endowment, funded the $7.4 million structure. "It was so elegant, so beautifully up to date. … When people walked into Jones Hall, they walked into a new epoch in Houston."

As home to the symphony and the Society for the Performing Arts, Jones Hall became the centerpiece of a downtown arts district internationally acclaimed for orchestral music, drama, opera and ballet.

More Information

$200M

price tag of suggested modifications

50

Jones Hall opened its doors 50 years ago this month

1,000

marble sheets replaced on the exterior in 2003

800

adjustable acoustic pods attached to the ceiling

Jones Hall

by the

numbers

Read More

That legacy of arts leadership will be celebrated Saturday when Friends of Jones Hall hosts a golden anniversary bash featuring famed violinist Itzhak Perlman - a Houston favorite - and the New York-based Lester Lanin Orchestra.

Even as revelers salute Jones Hall with champagne toasts and dance the night away, though, a troubling worry will linger.

Jones Hall - emblem of a brash young city's high art hopes - is past its prime.

"When Jones Hall opened, it was a cutting-edge performing arts venue," said Friends of Jones Hall chairman James Postl. "To be honest, it no longer is."

To Barry Moore, a senior associate at Gensler and a specialist in theater architecture, Jones Hall was "a masterpiece of design."

It is, he said, "one of the great mid-century buildings in the nation."

"It's iconic. It's beautiful. It's just exceptional," opined Society for the Performing Arts CEO and president June Christensen.

The architects, said Rice University architectural historian Stephen Fox, faced the challenge of erecting a massive concert hall on a relatively small downtown block.

Rather than lining up the entrance, lobby and performance space in a straight line, the designers inserted the auditorium diagonally and wrapped the lobby around it.

High above the lobby hovered Milwaukee-born sculptor Richard Lippold's "Gemini II," a gossamer web of aluminum and wire commissioned by the Jones endowment.

Best seats 'backstage'

Simultaneously modern and classical, with sheer walls of marble and eight-story columns, Jones Hall - built in the new formalism style - was Houston's nod to New York's Lincoln Center. One year after its opening, the building won the national American Institute of Architects' Honor Award.

With some 800 adjustable acoustic pods attached to the concert space's ceiling, Jones Hall was billed as possessing the most advanced sound technology of its era. But to contemporary ears, the quality of sound leaves much to be desired.

"The pods are sheet metal," said symphony principal trombonist Allen Barnhill. "They suck the sound right out of the hall."

Robert "Red" Pastorek, a bassist who retired in 2014 after 50 years with the symphony, unreeled a lengthy list of the hall's deficiencies - some remedied, some ongoing. In Jones Hall's earliest days, musicians were so disappointed in the hall's acoustics that they were ready to return to the old Music Hall. "The best seats in the house," he said, "are backstage."

When the Houston orchestra plays Carnegie Hall or Vienna's Musikverein, the musicians, he said, are surprised at how good they sound.

"Same musicians, same repertoire, but better acoustics," he said. "They can even enhance what an orchestra can do on its own. Reverberation is like the 12th man on the football field. You either have that support or you don't. Our musicians have to work incredibly hard at Jones Hall to create performances our audiences can feel and hear."

Arts insiders say that the venerable hall suffers other problems.

The number of restrooms is notoriously insufficient. Configuration of the stair-stepped lobby impedes pedestrian flow, not inconsequentially hampering the ability of patrons to buy cocktails and mingle.

Houston Grand Opera and the Houston Ballet, initially tenants of the hall, moved to the new Wortham Center in 1987. But the orchestra remained.

Pastorek's solution for the hall's problems is simple: tear it down.

"It's 50 years old," he said. "It's time for it to go."

Creating a master plan

In 2013, Houston Symphony began a search for alternate concert venues. Earlier this year, it concluded that Jones Hall - its deficiencies addressed - would remain its best option.

"It was determined that was the single best solution to meet our performance needs for the next 50 years," Hanson said. "There was a growing desire to keep our downtown performances in Jones Hall."

To that end, Friends of Jones Hall, the symphony, the performing arts society and the city have joined in a task force to create a master plan for the hall's improvement.

Suggested modifications, which could cost as much as $200 million, will be made public in early 2017, Postl said.

Among proposals being studied is a plan to install an adjustable stage tailored to the divergent acoustical needs of the orchestra and the often-amplified performances presented by Society for the Performing Arts.

While the issue of installing windows remains unresolved, Hanson was enthusiastic about the possibility.

"On concert nights," he said, "one can drive past or around Jones Hall without realizing there are several thousand people experiencing a live symphonic experience. … Imagine a front entrance that welcomes the community into the hall and does a better job of making it widely known to those walking or driving past that this is a living, breathing hall, not just an architectural icon."

The proposed changes would not be the first made to Jones Hall.

About 13 years ago, the city replaced more than 1,000 sheets of the building's marble veneer after a panel tumbled to the pavement. Investigation revealed that metal fasteners had deteriorated after inadequately thick stone panels, warping in Houston's fierce climate, exposed them to the elements.

Jones a 'man of vision'

Those who say it's time for the Jones Hall to change point out that it was the inadequacies of the 1937 Music Hall that led Houston builder-philanthropist Jesse Jones to advocate for construction of a modern concert venue that became Jones Hall.

Jones died in 1956, six years before his Houston Endowment awarded the city funds - almost $50 million in 2016 dollars - for the concert hall project.

"That was the largest grant that we had made to that point," said Ann Stern, the endowment's president. "While Jesse Jones wasn't alive when the gift was made - it was very much his wife, Mary Gibbs Jones, and his nephew, John T. Jones, who did it - it was very much a part of him. He was such a man of vision. He knew that for Houston to be a world-class city, a cultural ecosystem was required. It wasn't just icing on the cake, it was fundamental."

The question now is, how will Jones Hall, which helped establish that ecosystem, fit into it in the future?

Allan Turner, senior general assignments reporter, joined the Houston Chronicle in 1985. He has been assistant suburban editor, assistant state editor and roving state reporter. He previously worked at daily newspapers in Amarillo, Austin and San Antonio.